Though it staggers popular belief, Los Angeles now ranks among the densest urban concentrations in the United States. Yet somehow the city's notorious sprawl remains a convenient measure that is used by New Yorkers, San Franciscans and other L.A. haters to compare the city to their own as the ultimate urban problem.

However, while Woody Allen's caricature of Los Angeles in “Annie Hall” molders in the national imagination, New York and Los Angeles have proved that they have more in common than not. Both are economic capitals, immigrant entrepots and media empires, and both have polyglot concentrations of extreme wealth and poverty. New York and L.A. reign as the nation's most global cities.

Incessant demographic growth over the past century demands a revision of policy.

So why should it surprise us that city leaders in Los Angeles are striving to accommodate new levels of density? The only surprise is that such efforts have not come sooner. While some hillside denizens bemoan the blocking of their views, the sprawl they look down on is not sustainable. In fact, it has become a relic of an earlier age when Americans, including an entire generation of New Yorkers, rejected the public life of the city for the private life of the suburbs.

This impulse made modern Los Angeles, a city born of profound anxieties about rampant urbanization and its threat to social order. Southern California’s abundance of open land, its congenial climate, its compatibility with the car and its domesticated suburbs: these factors birthed a new urban order, a simpatico alternative to the grind of New York and its Rust Belt counterparts.

Times are different now. Los Angeles is threatened by its own success. Incessant demographic growth over the past century demands a revision of policy: reinvestment in mass transit, zoning, clustered development and adaptive reuse. Increasingly, Angelenos are rediscovering the lost vitality of their fabled streets — not to ape New York, but to maximize the possibilities of living in a unique pool of human diversity.